To Be Broadly Cynical

Riding over on the overpass highway I could see into the distance and I suddenly had an aching urge to drive out into the Chinese countryside and get lost.  Perhaps a high speed train would do, but where would I go?  And in the winter its's cold.  Soon it will be Spring Festival and all the trains will be sold out, so where are you going to go?  This was the pattern of my mind's thinking.  Money and time, awfully difficult things to get your hands on.

Off to the side there is a poster of a matronly woman who is teaching a younger ticket toll maiden how to smile by having her practice with a pencil in her month.  Smiling seems to be a big part of all these billboards here at the tollbooth.  China won't always be able to promote smiling with a straight face. When does China get wealthy enough to be broadly cynical?  This we-have-it-all generation will presumably have some things to say.  It's taking a while though..

There is clearly one lady in the photo-set, “the matronly lady,” who is getting maximum face-time here.  Was she chosen for her sincere look or because she is the friend of the cousin of someone who was responsible for this campaign?  Wow, there she is again.  This is star-treatment for this gal.  I’ve no choice but to look at her here to the side the tollbooth over and over again, until we pass. 

I seem to remember my great uncle, or was it his neighbor from my youngest days there in the Hudson Valley, someone my grandmother knew, who had the job of the tollbooth person on the Mid Hudson Bridge and it was suggested this person got cancer and died young or younger because they worked there with all the asbestos that was generated from the brakes that became part of the atmosphere as they breathed every day as each car slowed to pay.  Post-war, mid cynical waxing, I don’t suspect he was ever taught nor needed to practice smiling. 

No traffic today though.  That’s a grand thing.  Almost worth smiling about.  Heading across town at 1:30PM in the afternoon, we're making very good time.  It’s cold out there though.  Cold riding to the gym this morning, of course.  I looked.  It is twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit in Beijing today.  I had a call after I’d returned from my bike ride with some folks in Boston.  How cold is it there for you?  Oh, it’s twenty-three degrees Fahrenheit.  I’d figured Boston would have bene much colder.  That made me feel hearty.  Till I talked, later in the day, with someone who was in Vermont and she said it was ten degrees Fahrenheit there among the Green Mountains, and that sounded notably worse.

Thursday 12/13/18